Hey there! Remember me? You know, the guy who makes up the seemingly never-ending stream of words that go here? You’ll all be glad to hear that I’m back and ready and rarin’ to go.
Well, okay, hopefully some of you will be glad to hear that, at least. Right? Or a couple of you, maybe.
Somebody? Anybody? Bueller?
Regardless, I am back, full of vim and vigor or piss and vinegar or, I don’t know, insert your own strange yet enthusiastic couplet here! The bottom line is that I’m ready to get back to the work of making words on a regular basis.
You see, my friends, I have ventured into the inky, soulless void and returned to speak of it.
First, let me back up. If you were perhaps wondering why I wasn’t persona-non-corpus* around here last week, and didn’t arrive at three after putting one and one together, it’s because the Puddinette and I loaded up the Family Truckster, strapped in the puddinlings, and set course of the Mecca of all family road trip destinations, Walt Disney World.
How was it? Pretty much exactly as I expected it to be, in terms of both agony and ecstasy.
Hold up, “agony and ecstasy” just doesn’t do it justice. What I mean is, there were moments I thought I was perhaps being funneled through a hellish, molten cauldron of sweating, immobile people-flesh towards an infinity of skin-flaying torture (it turned out I was only waiting in line for Space Mountain). And yet, conversely, we also rejoiced in times of soul-warming delight, when all of us – me, the Puddinette, and all four of the kids – were ensnared by the magic of the place, captivated with breathless wonder.
(Also, yes, I realize that paragraph is ridiculously overwritten. That’s kind of the idea. Disney World seems designed specifically to engender hyperbole.)
Even more inexplicably, Disney World somehow managed to visit both of those entirely contradictory experiences upon on us on the very same day, each and every day of our visit. The place is, for lack of a better word, Full. Full of people and fun and cost and wonder and things to do and lines in which you do nothing, and, and, and…well, sometimes all that ‘Full’-ness is overwhelming. To say the least.
There’s far too much about our vacation for me to fit everything into one post. Plus, after a week of little-or-no real posting, it’s probably best not to drop 1000 words on you in a fit of convulsive exposition. Your eyes will go all foggy, and you’ll end up slumped over and drooling on yourselves. Which, not coincidentally, was pretty much how I felt after 13 hours in the Magic Kingdom. But that’s neither here nor there.
The important thing today is that we are home, we all survived the 1900+ mile round-trip drive, and while there were certainly sacrifices made, none of them required a pint of chicken blood. Slowly, ever so slowly, we are re-acclimating to the less-exhausting yet also less-sharp-and-colorful world of the everyday.
With the Big Vacation behind us, we now just have to survive until, well, school starts back up in August.
*whimpers*
Oh! And now that you know why I took last week off, did you spot the commonality among last week’s (re)posts? I figured since my family was making a Real World ™ stab at duplicating National Lampoon’s Vacation (well, minus that unfortunate Aunt Edna business), I’d repost entries where I’d made some reference to the timeless, classic film.
Was that pretty thin as a thematic approached to a week off? Oh, hellz yeah. Paper. But hey, I concocted the idea after 78,000 ounces of Coke Zero (give or take) and 8 hours of driving, somewhere in the middle of southern Georgia. I might not have been of sound mind at the time. Truth be told, we’re all lucky I didn’t just repost Wikipedia articles on clinical insanity.
At any rate, it’s a brand new week, and time to dig deep into revising OTHER THING, so that maybe, just maybe, I might reveal it’s wispy secrets to you sometime in future.
Oh, and if you ask really, really nicely, I might even post a picture of the new hat I bought to protect my increasingly-vulnerable scalp from the angry Flame Monster in the skies of Central Florida.
Pud’n
*I totally just made this up. I have no idea if it makes any sense whatsoever. But I like it.
Puddintopia 
So relieved that you survived…I was just reminiscing (ahem) about our trip to Disney about ten years ago. Sadly, our youngest, the actual Princess, doesn’t remember it. GAH! Fortunately, there are pictures around here somewhere, so we can prove that she really did meet Ariel and Snow White.
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Heh…it’ll probably be a few years before I do any nostalgic, misty-water-colored reminiscing about it. 🙂 I am glad we got pictures though, even if I realized I’m starting to look more and more like George Wendt. Time to get back to running, methinks.
Oh, and Ariel has all new digs in Fantasyland. Her own Grotto and everything. It’s huge. We skipped most of the character greeting stuff, though. Oy, there’s enough waiting in line without having to wait just to get a furry hug.
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Disney World is its own unique experience and totally incomparable to anything else. Old Uncle Walt was an anti-Semite, a Red-Hater, a Union Buster and a lot of other things, but he had the ability to dream superbly and it shows when you look around what used to be hundreds and hundreds of acres of worthless central Florida swampland. Too bad he didn’t live long enough to see what The Disney Channel and Radio Disney would have in store. On the other hand, what Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Lindsey Lohan have become would probably have killed him…
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Truly! I remember reading many years ago that he used to be very particular about what kind of bathing suits Annette Funicello wore in those beach movies. Miley, Selena, and Demi Levato definitely would’ve given him aneurysms.
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